My read of the situation is that both Enron and Andersen Consulting
broke the law and it seems likely that some people will at least have
to defend themselves from a series of criminal and civil actions.
I'm not sure that there was a breakdown in legislation with the
possible exception of Andersen having a conflict of interest between
their responsibilities as an auditor and their business consulting
unit. There should have been more distrust and oversight from the
auditors. I think that Andersen Consulting will be severely damaged
by the civil suits. Enron is out of business and their officers
will probably have most of their money taken from them in litigation.
I doubt there will be any winners in this situation and hopefully
some of these turkeys will go to jail.
I don't see how de-regulation created this situation and how the
regulatory bodies would have done a better job. Are you suggesting
that the government should take over the role of Andersen for all
corporations? That would be a big mistake and would probably not
solve the basic problem that people willing to break the law uh...
break the law.
It is unfortunate that many people lost money on this company
either through direct investment or indirectly through mutual funds
(like I did), but I don't think that a large bureaucracy of
government auditors are going to help here. There will be some
fine tuning here and there, but the main change will be when the
auditors see that their company is in danger if they are not
aggressive in uncovering mismanagement.
I saw the debates on 401k reform... Maybe there is some merit in
restricting the percentage of stock in someone's portfolio, but I
would rather see some sort of notification when that percentage
is high to the employee and a guarantee of a choice to move their
money into a more diversified account. It would be a shame to
limit informed people from investing (err... gambling) in a
company they think will do well...
Joel
On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 05:54:11PM -0800, ME wrote:
> With the distrust of corps to regulate themselves (by way of Enron
> scandal) de-regulation initiatives and bills passing the House may be
> possible, bt passing the Senate seems unlikely.
>
> But I am just a computer nerd, so what do I know?
>
> -ME
>
[...]
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